Extended Mind and Political Theory

Andy Clark’s central, and surprising thesis, is that mind is not what exists between the ears, but is rather the mesh of brain, body, and world itself. At the beginning of Supersizing the Mind, Clark relates an anecdote from Feynman to illustrate this idea. Charles Wiener had expressed delight in discovering a collection of Feynman’s notes and sketches, indicating how wonderful it was to have a record of Fyenman’s day-to-day work. As Clark puts it, Feynman reacted with unexpected sharpness:

“I actually did the work on the paper,” he said.

“Well,” Weiner said, “the work was done in your head, but the record of it is still here.”

“No, it’s not a record, not really. It’s working You have to work on paper and this is the paper. Okay?” (from Gleick 1993, 409)

The point of this anecdote, in Clark’s view, is that the pencil and paper are quite literally parts of the mind in the process of cognition. What is on the paper is not, for Clark, something that merely records a trace of cognition, but rather the brain, body, and these external artifacts are all the cognition. In a manner that immediately brings Morton’sEcological Thought to mind, it is this mesh that is cognition. Here it’s important to note that there is no Hegelian style idealism here. Clark is not asserting “the identity of substance and subject”, such that substance is subject and subject is substance. Clark’s position is thoroughly materialist. The pencil and paper are material entities. His point is that they are not merely props or tools for cognition, but that entities such as this play a key role in cognition by affording and constraining possibilities of cognition through their use.

Throughout his work Clark’s emphasis is on real-world cognition in insects, animals, artificial lifeforms (like cockroach robots) and humans. Biological and technological lifeforms, argues Clark, perpetually offload problems of cognition on the external environment so as to maximize real-time responses to situations and to minimize “expensive” computation (representation). Why for example, have a complicated mental map of my living room, when I can use the living room itself (as perceived by entities such as humans) as its own best model? In other words, organisms perpetually rely on the scaffolding of the world in their cognition. This scaffolding consists of relatively stable regularities in the environment. In the case of humans, Clark argues, a large part of this scaffolding consists of culture in the form of institutions, technologies, and language. Thus, for example, my iPhone is literally, for Clark, a part of my memory. Rather that relying heavily on internal memory to recall everyone’s phone number and email address, rather than encoding all of the dining recommendations I’ve heard from friends, family, and the media, I can instead simply turn to my iPhone and pull these things up. The iPhone itself becomes a part of the cognitive process. However, Clark’s thesis is much stronger than this. Cultural institutions and technologies begin to think for us. In Being-There Clark gives the example of an office where there are all sorts of subroutines for particular actions (“place the pink form in the bin labeled x”). The institutional structure does not require any centralized planner nor agents that have an overall representation of how the office works, but rather all the subroutines, including their material elements, collaborate in a distributed fashion together to produce a set of regular results. The institution as a whole has cognition in and through its mesh. This mesh wouldn’t be able to function without brains, but those brains are only a component in these cognitive processes. This is what allows us to claim that cultures and societies think. A big part of this thesis, and I can’t develop it in detail here, is that there are a variety of ways in which natural and cultural environments channel and structure cognition.

My intuition is that the thesis of extended mind has tremendous social and political implications (which sadly Clark doesn’t explore in his work as far as I can tell, but which is a boon for all of us working in the vein of OOO). Here I will only bookmark some of these implications, opening a space to develop them in the future. First, if Clark’s thesis about the extended mind is true, we can’t speak univocally about the “human”. Foucault had already recognized this in the close of The Order of Things when he spoke of “the death of man”. In speaking of the death of man, I believe Foucault had dimly glimpsed the death of man thesis (in OT he showed how “man” was the product of a set of institutional and discursive constructions, i.e., what Clark calls “scaffoldings”). If the extended mind thesis is right, then there will be as many different minds as there are brain-body-world assemblages. Marx glimpsed this when he argued that the factory worker and the farmer were two entirely different species in the Manifesto. He develops this further in his chapter on the working day in volume 1 of Capital where he shows how the industrial factory fundamentally transforms the nature of homo sapian existence. Here we sorely need a well developed version (not just nods, but fine-grained analyses) of Deleuze and Guattari’s ethology as developed in A Thousand Plateaus, where the being of entities is understand in terms of what they can do, not by representational resemblances (recall the famous thesis that “the work horse is closer to the ox than the race horse”). Here sorting of entities isn’t based on embodied resemblances, but on capacities to do. When this is meshed with the extended mind thesis, we begin to sort cognizing beings based on extended assemblages involving brains but also world and technologies (this, incidentally, is what allows us to take into account arguments that discuss the role that privilege plays for particular groups and that the absence of privilege plays in other groups).

read on!
It will also be noted that part of the scaffolding of what we often call “humans” (our language isn’t fine grained enough to denote all the entities that are here referred to) will necessarily involve all sorts of animals. Part of extended cognition and minds will include the worms, bees, and other small bacteria that make soil possible for farming. It will involve livestock. It will involve ecosystems. However, these perspectives will be reducible. It will not only be the case that humans cognize in and through the agency of other animals (think of Haraway and her dog, together they form a mind), but it will also be that many organisms (grass, cows, dogs, cats, wheat, cane toads, etc) use humans as a part of their minds.

Aside: Some folks have objected that nonhuman objects have no moral status because they are incapable of reason and therefore have no agency. This is a perverse and bizarre justification for not considering nonhuman entities in our ethical deliberations. As Wolfe argues, the issue isn’t whether they are responsible but whether they can suffer. It doesn’t matter whether or not they are capable of deliberation in the same way humans are. The argument for this position– and I believe it’s deeply convincing –actually comes from the domain of the human. In those instances where humans are incapable of rational agency– severe mental illness, dementia, mental deficiency, catatonia, coma, alzheimer’s, amnesia, etc. –we don’t suddenly say that biological experimentation is okay with these folks, or that it’s okay to use them as food or throw them on a fire as fuel. This point categorically recognizes that the condition of whether, in Kant’s terms, to not treat something as a means is entirely independent of whether that other entity is itself a rational agent. Ergo, nonhumans.

The extended mind hypothesis also has a number of implications for feminist, racial, queer, and Marxist thought. If it is true that mind is extended, then a big part of understand race and gender will involve careful and nuanced investigation of the worldly scaffolding that comes to structure race and gender. This will also be the case where class relations are concerned (and, of course, all these things intersect such that we can’t treat any of these categories as overdetermining the others. We need to ask, for example, what the extended mind is that comes to structure sexual institutions. What are the scaffoldings, in other words, that ground heteronormativity? What are the scaffoldings that ground patriarchy and male privilege? These scaffoldings, additionally, should be seen as simultaneously channeling men and women, queer and straight, white and brown, etc. If we don’t engage in object-oriented archaeologies of these scaffoldings then we will be unable to develop universal-egalitarian political interventions that respond to them. There is so much more to say here, but I’m in a rush to make dinner so I’ll bookmark these things for later discussions.

Like this:

LikeLoading...

Related

65 Responses to “Extended Mind and Political Theory”

The gesture toward the political implications made my mind leap to Bennett’s notion of ‘distributive agency’. I also know that Shannon Sullivan at Penn State is doing work that attempts to think of how the scaffolding of the world is our scaffolding. In particular, she is working on the scaffolding of sexism and racism. You’ve got me anxious to read embodied cognition lit. again. I just bought some Alva Noe!

Doug Hofstadter at Indiana U. has written convincingly about distributed SELFHOOD in his famous book I am a Strange Loop. He describes what it was like when his wife died. Doug would be making sandwiches in the kitchen for his kids and experience a visceral sensation of actually ‘shapeshifting’ into his wife — literally feeling as if he were his departed wife, from the inside.

Hofstadter comes to conclude that the analogical idiosyncracies of embodied cognition can be distributed amongst, for example, family members.

This can be extended to gender identity also — the construction of gender identity in the context of distributed selfhood.

I imagine a kind of recombinant technology of embodied cognition. Aristotle made famous in his Poetics the importance of mimesis in the roots of art and even in the drama of historic events (such as royal weddings.) Mimesis is associated with representation at a novice level, but increasingly with the development of a unique character rooted in representation at a more sophisticated phase.

I would suggest that Aristotle is on to something. The cognitive ethology of mimicry, and mimicry’s MODIFICATION in the formation of various self-like characteristics, perhaps connects with distributed cognition and distributed selfhood, yielding a framework for analyzing topics like the formation of gender identity.

I especially love the idea of the human becoming part of the agency of other nonhuman entities, such as dogs, or even more bizarrely, cities, which use, among a vast array of other entities, humans to survive and subsist and reproduce themselves. Once you concede that causal dependence is not ontological dependence, very strange, alternative histories become possible.

Very interesting. I approach these issues through Edwin Hutchins’ concept of “distributed cognition,” which he developed in the 80s. As you describe, it is a way of understanding cognition as emergent from relation and of extending cognitive power by linking through a network. Hutchins’ classic example is the network required for steering a large ship. As with your example of Feynman, I would certainly view symbolic behavior as distributed cognition. Speech and gesture, to recall Leroi-Gourhan, offer new relations (and rhetorics) that enable new cognitive processes that are distributed into the world.

Amazes me that people are only cottoning on to this stuff now in the OOO community rather than Ray’s Churchland and Metzinger inspired radical elimativism! The 4EA stuff has so much more to offer an OOO position. And of course it all goes back to Varela predominantly and we know where that theory of mind really come from no!? Sterelny’s development of Clark’s position on the role of “objects” and “things” in this “mesh” is even better than Clark’s.

I wonder if terms like “scaffold” are not restraints on the modelling of situated becoming. The image of this metaphor still valorizes a determining subjectivity as well as freezing the nodes of the immediate assemblage. Both are useful if the goal is a coordination with a science practice but such meta-structures might not be good pre-dispositions on a first order investigation.

On a serious but somewhat funny note, the implications for the political lead to some astounding ideas:

A pair of shoes, pants, a shirt, a car, a bottle of water, a bunch of ideas, traffic laws, roads, and I are conspiring to oppress a bunch of neighboring politically-differing objects. We form a bizzare pan-psychic alliance of minds carving out a strange political order in the shadow of an impending extinction. We are the sinister imperial objects in a war against the Communism of Actants alliance and the Timothy Morton anarcho-objects. Beware, we are coming.

I guess G. Bateson was a classic extended mind theorist (ecology of mind, mind in nature)…
I guess it all depends on your definition of ‘mind’….some argue it is neither between our ears, nor everywhere…

“Finally, one should observe that space, or dispersivity for forces, is not a cosmological primitive: vast amounts of fresh space are being continuously created with the expansion of the observable universe.
What we can localize in space is action, not the action’s determinations, whence “minds’s localization” means that we localize the presence of some of mind’s operations, not that of their de-terminations.
Whether mental or not, the latter seem to eschew manifestation in such a derivative occurrence, spatiality.”

“In a dozen independent academic fields, hints have recently surfaced whose combination suggests that the unknown localization of minds in nature features cer-tain characteristics, the most remarkable of which is motion.
It comes from the following observations:

1. Genetic epistemology is generally considered a branch of psychology, chiefly developed in the last three quarters of the 20th century by the efforts of the biologist-psychologist Jean Piaget, and many collaborators.
Their work shows that minds achieve intellectual development through behavioral probing of reality, not through its Platonic contemplation.
The focus of the minds’ description thus shifted onto the origination of probing actions, or initiatives, a feature distinguishing minds from non-minds and discussed below.
Whatever it is that senses, it proceeds as if enclosed in a supple bag:
in this case, only by taking initiatives, i.e. by palpating the bag’s wall, can it recognize what is invariantly conserved outside and, so, build a mental map or picture of the surrounding happenings.” Mario Crocco

Look, I find Andy Clark’s stuff fascinating too, but the idea that ‘it has consequences for feminist accounts etc’ feels kind of insulting to me. There have been an extraordinary number of feminist accounts which have *already* expanded and extended Merleau-Ponty’s description of being-in-the-world (the arguable origin for Clark’s analysis) in precisely the ways you’re suggesting ‘we’ need to do. Accounts that interrogate the ‘scaffolding’ offered by other embodied subjects, accounts that explore the heteronormativity of space and its effects on how bodies are oriented, accounts that suggest norms are ‘incorporated and excorporated’ objects, accounts that consider racialisation as a process enacted perceptually, accounts of the way that the ableism of space combined with dominant shared styles of being-in-the-world function to produce certain bodies as disabled. I’m not unsympathetic here – it’s really hard to be aware of stuff outside of your field – but I do wish that those who weren’t already aware of particular strains of thought wouldn’t assume that they don’t already exist. The fact that, for e.g., you read Andy Clark rather than Sara Ahmed, isn’t neutral, and I think it’s important to try to be conscious of how that’s structuring the ways that you’re thinking about this stuff.

I’m sorry; I know this is coming off as kind of hostile, but I’ve been thinking a lot about gender and feminism on this site and others, and within OOO and SR more generally, and I’m getting a little irritable about it, so this felt a bit like that straw, you know.

Sorry you feel that way, Wildly. It wasn’t intended that way. Unfortunately we’re not all omniscient and therefore do not know all that is going on out there. Your remark about choosing Clark rather than Ahmed seems to implicitly suggest that you attribute omniscience to me because you pose it as a choice— as if I am intentionally excluding –rather than an encounter. Donna Haraway and Karen Barad are two theorists, in my view, that represent the sorts of trends that you’re talking about who are talking about scaffolding in the way I’d like to see it discussed. Jane Bennett, above all, is a theorist that, while not focused on feminist issues, discusses scaffolding in ways I find important. I do, however, appear my theory to be broad as possible so it can be situated in a variety of different problematics.

Here, too, I should add that the issue isn’t simply about the presence or absence of the body in discussions (I notice you focus a lot on this in your posts about Ahmed)– though that’s part of the story –but on assemblages that are themselves mind. Here the pencil and piece of paper are literally a part of the mind. The question becomes what are the non-bodily, nonhuman objects in which human bodies are embedded, and how do these objects enable, constrain, enhance, obscure, etc., various powers, what bodies do they generate (vis a vis Spinoza’s notion of body as “what something can do”), and in what ways do they lock us into particular social assemblages. It’s not that we have body or mind on one side and pencil and paper on the other, but rather that body, brain, pencil, and paper are mind. The point is not so much about feminist thought, but a lot of social theory in general that implicitly treats mind as something merely between the ears and that separates off body from these assemblages. The nature of the questions we ask are going to be different depending on how we answer these sorts of questions because the units of analysis will be different. In one case the unit of analysis will be a self-enclosed representational mind, in another intrinsic features of human bodies, and in yet another assemblages that include mind, brain, and nonhuman objects such that that triad is the unit of analysis (rather than a particular element of the triad being a unit of analysis). For example, we can’t here speak univocally of a woman’s body or a queer body because these bodies will be enmeshed in different assemblages and will thereby have different minds. My intention is only to draw attention to forms of thought that I believe are posing questions in the right sort of way. I’m always happy to encounter new references. Thanks for the reference to Sara Ahmed. There’s no conspiracy in referencing Clark rather than her. He’s just who I’ve happened to come across in the context of my own work. I believe it’s helpful to draw attention to useful connections wherever possible.

[sigh] Yes, it’s pretty clear that Haraway and Barad are basically the favoured feminists. Is it the science that makes it so?

I’m not suggesting there’s a conspiracy, as I made pretty clear; it’s never needed to be intended, nor a conspiracy – which is surely the point of your discussion of the extended mind stuff above? it’s not about individuals reflecting and setting out to exclude, it’s about a bunch of implicit ‘cognitive scaffolding’ that ensures a conspiracy doesn’t need to exist or even really be thought through in order for exclusion to happen – which is precisely why I asked for more awareness. I’m suggesting that these accounts are already out there, and going strong, and that it becomes a reflection of the marginalisation of feminist perspectives more generally that they’re not really read, or recognised, or of concern (unless they’re Donna Haraway, apparently, or Karen Barad… is it the science that makes them more supportable by the scaffold, do you think?). In fact, I’d really make the point that feminism has in lots of respects led the way in critiquing the containment and delineation of ‘the mind’ as internal and radically individual, a critique made not least because of the dire implications that fantasy has had for women. So this stuff about ‘social theory in general implicitly treats the mind as something merely between the ears’ is just another demoralising reminder of how so much astonishing feminist work gets excluded, forgotten, swallowed whole and then spat out, apparently sparkling with newness, ready for gender to be added back in again, as innovation. Sigh. I guess ‘Girls Welcome’ is making me think about how structural this stuff is, again…

Taking your request for references at face value, though, I’d add to the list (and these aren’t all people I agree with) Margrit Shildrick, Gail Weiss, Rosalyn Diprose, Kristin Zeiler, Samantha Murray, Myra Hird, Jenz Germon, Anne Wickstrom, Rosi Braidotti (more and less, these days), Erik Malmqvist, Elizabeth Wilson, Kevin Patterson and Bill Hughes (though their stuff is older now), Vicki Kirby and Nikki Sullivan. They’re some of the people I’m familiar with in accounts of this, but Ahmed’s ‘queer phenomenology’ is most explicit on the inextricability of the sexual and the spatial.

There are a couple of reasons I find your remarks here deeply perplexing. First, knowing that you’re deeply grounded in phenomenology I take it as likely that you also take finitude seriously. What is perplexing here is that you you seem to violate this principle of finitude in your calls for omniscience (which, I’d add, is a very patriarchal or masculinist gesture). Second, when I do mention feminist theorists that I have both written about and who are doing the sort of work I believe needs to be done, you reject them as not being the right sorts of feminists or something. Here I find myself especially perplexed by your remarks about science. For me it’s not that Barad, for example, talks about science, but that she takes the role of nonhuman actors seriously. Likewise with Haraway, Bennett, Stengers, etc. How is this an exclusion of feminism when one is working with feminist thinkers? Moreover, looking at your blog I can’t say that I see any discussions of the sort of scaffolding that I’m talking about here. The fact that I cite a particular set of thinkers and that you nonetheless find cause to reject them suggests that you’re not really presenting a real argument. The situation is similar to the treatment of Obama here in the United States. The teabaggers endlessly asked for his longterm birth certificate. When he finally presented it they didn’t cease attacking him but instead began to find ways to delegitimate the long-term birth certificate or call into question his educational achievements. At that point it becomes clear that the issue was never about the birth certificate but simply about deligitimating Obama. Your argument has this flavor. In response to your remarks I reference feminist thinkers that I do believe are doing this sort of work and you then proceed to dismiss them because they talk a lot about science or something (and here I think you show a lack of understanding of OOO associating, it seems, its realism and materialism with scientism… That’s the Brassier camp, not us). What’s one to do? Like a game of “hunt the snipe”, the goal posts will always, for you, shift. You’ll make the claim that somehow feminist thought is being excluded when, low and behold, feminist thinkers are being taken very seriously and we’re in constant dialogue with those thinkers. You’ll then say “but oh, they’re not the right sorts of feminists because they talk about science!” The conclusion seems to be that you’re simply intent on dismissing SR because, well, you just don’t like it or something. The most bizarre thing is you pitching this in terms of bringing back gender as “an innovation”, rather than seeing those talking about these things as being near and dear to our heart. It’s not as if queer issues are somehow tangential to my life and thought, or that I’m simply talking about these things as an idle curiosity. I would suggest that you’d do better to think in terms of alliances rather than ownership, as it seems that the whole subtext of your intervention here is about ownership and a sense that something is being stolen rather than worked with and taken seriously in the spirit of alliance.

Oh for heaven’s sakes. I asked for specificity, and an acknowledgement of that specificity, not omniscience. I’m thoroughly not interested in ownership, but I think that yes, genealogies are important, particularly when it comes to the continued marginalisation of already-marginal voices. Alliance is great, when it *is* alliance. And I wasn’t rejecting Haraway or Barad, not at all, and particularly not because they talk about science (I talk about science, though less on the blog). I was suggesting that there might be particular reasons that they have become the ‘go-to feminists’ in this context, which wasn’t specifically about any association between OOO and scientism, but more the point that science remains privileged in more global ways that feeds into the circulation of particular thinkers. My point was that there’s very limited engagement with feminist thought, which is especially evident when Clark is being situated as enabling particular kinds of feminist thought which I think are already, and have already, been happening, and for a long time.

My suggestion about gender being brought back in as an innovation was more to suggest that where you propose considering gender using Clark, other feminist thinkers have elaborated an account which deindividualises and decentres ‘the mind,’ precisely in and through a critique of sexuation and gender.

As for me wanting to dismiss SR, that seems a really radical interpretation of *anything* I’ve said (!!) so I’m not sure what to do with any of that. I’m ambivalent. I feel I should also add that the comment from you I was responding to was a lot shorter than what is here on the blog; you should probably be aware that if someone has signed up for comment updates, they don’t receive any edits (the first was kinder, and my response was thus assuming a far warmer context than this has turned out to be.)

But whatever. I have to say that I’ve waited a *really* long time to participate in this blog, because whilst I’ve been interested and engaged and intrigued at times, I’ve also watched so many people receive these kinds of responses.

I think your participation in these comments has been the equivalent of asking someone if they’re still beating their wife. Of course you were asking for omniscience, for you treated discussion of someone like Andy Clark as some sort of conspiracy designed to, as you put it, exclude and silence women’s voices, rather than simply treating it as a simple lack of awareness. Additionally, given that so much of your own work focuses on Levinas, Merleau-Ponty, Heidegger, and Sartre, I find it ironic that you somehow take it as some assault on women theorists to plumb the work of a thinker such as Clark. Certainly if these male theorists in the phenomenological tradition can be of value to feminist thought someone like Clark can be of value as well. Or is it that only certain voices and theoretical frameworks have a right to be heard. Perhaps a more productive response to this post would have been “wow, what Clark is doing sounds interesting and meshes well with theorists x, y, and z but needs to do a better job addressing issues a, b, and c”. That’s a bit of what I was saying in this post. Instead– and here your points about “kindness” and “warmth” are completely ridiculous given your initial post –you instead came in guns blazing, talking about being insulted, hostile, and making rather ugly accusations. Sorry if I fail to see the warmth or kindness in such a post. I wish you’d waited longer to participate on this blog and am floored that you find my response to you, given your remarks here, surprising. That response would have been mitigated had you not come in acting like such an ass and making accusations of exclusion and silencing where no such thing was taking place. It takes quite a bit of moxy to express surprise and disdain (“oh for heavens sake” and “sigh” and “I’m vaguely insulted) at one who responds strongly to the suggestion that they’re intentionally trying to exclude feminist thinkers when a) the post was about a specific thinker and what resources they might offer in thinking certain issues (I don’t know about you, but I’m always happy to find more conceptual tools), b) when said person does discuss feminist thinkers, and when c) the whole point of the post was to address questions of how these theoretical frameworks might lead us to reformulate such questions (and here I note that implicit in your post seems to be a view that we can speak univocally about women, race, and queerness, when in fact this whole theoretical framework calls into question the sorting of identities based on bodies alone, i.e., if the assemblage body+brain+paper+pencil is a mind, then we can no longer sort entities based on resemblances bodies might possess (being-female, being-male, being-black, etc), but must instead treat each of these assemblages as bodies in their own right. That’s a pretty radical departure from any theory I’ve heard in these debates (though Haraway is saying something along these lines in her concept of “cyborgs”), but again this might just be ignorance on my part.

Rhetorically you have constructed an impossible situation. If one doesn’t discuss feminist thinkers in a particular context (it was a post about Andy Clark after all), then they’re guilty of excluding and silencing women. I suppose we shouldn’t discuss Deleuze and Guattari either, though Grosz and others might beg to differ. And, of course, it goes without saying here that you’re implicitly suggesting that theorists such as Clark shouldn’t be discussed at all (isn’t that the logical conclusion of your thesis there?). On the other hand, if one does discuss feminist theories and issues in feminist theory that person is guilty of, to quote you, “exclud[ing], forgott[ing], swallow[ing] whole and then sp[itting] out” feminist theory. The verdict? One’s damned if they do and damned if they don’t, and this is because, within your framework, they were a priori damned to begin with (the reasoning for why they’re damned is post hoc ergo propter hoc, i.e., it was never about the reasons cited to begin with). And here I’ll note again that your remarks about alliances are entirely dishonest because you’re still insisting that feminist voices are somehow being excluded and silenced, when in fact there’s been quite a bit of reference to them (once again implicitly suggesting that feminist voices are being excluded, silenced, and marginalized). Now if you have a problem with these particular thinkers (Haraway, Bennett, Barad, Stengers), then let’s have a discussion about that. Let’s not make the broader, demonstrably untrue claim that somehow feminist voices are being excluded, silenced, and marginalized (and here I would simply note that I find it highly unlikely that you engage with all feminist thinkers, but that you too have your schools of thought. Do you, for example, engage with analytic feminist theorists? Have you made extensive discussions of, say, Kate Hayles or Nussbaum? If not, why are you excluding feminist voices?).

Finally, I think what you’re missing in your theory about why people gravitate towards folks like Haraway and Barad is the broader theoretical framework of actor-network-theory that de-emphasizes representationalist and symbolic conceptions of culture and society and that emphasizes the role that nonhuman agencies play in why social formations and identities take the form they do. There is a broad theoretical tradition here that holds that things like tools and media can’t simply be treated as implements that upon which humans project their own purposes and goals, but that media play a key role in structuring human beings by virtue of generating intentionalities that exceed the intentions of their users. Haraway, Barad, and Bennett are very much working in this tradition. Given that that tradition, arising out of Latour and Stengers, is very much at the heart of OOO, it comes as no surprise that OOO theorists would gravitate towards these particular gender and feminist theorists, as well as other theorists proposing similar theoretical frameworks such as Clark, Noe, and Strelny. In other words, there’s something of a theoretical paradigm here. Just as you gravitate towards those working in the phenomenological tradition, something similar is taking place here. It’s not the science here that makes these figures the go-to folks (and honestly I think your claim is really only true of Barad and doesn’t work so much with Haraway), but rather their commitment to a variant of actor-network-theory which is also a variant of OOO. As for Ahmed, she is defending a rather traditional Marxist-Althusserian style materialism, which is very remote from the claims made by actor-network-theorists. The ANT theorists are not simply claiming that things like material conditions as embodied in resources, economics, institutions, discursive practices, etc., inform and influence us, but are claiming that media and nonhumans are genuine and fullblown actors in their own right, that embody intentions and aims independent of the humans that use them. This is what I gather, at any rate. I literally only learned about the New Materialisms collection last week and have thus not yet had the opportunity to read it.

All this aside, the upsetting thing about this whole discussion is that it didn’t need to go this way. A different rhetorical strategy emphasizing overlap between the feminist thinkers you value and the work discussed in this post would have led to a productive discussion about these overlaps, how they might contribute to one another, a deepening of the claims being made, etc. Instead you approached the discussion from the standpoint of a superegoic patriarchal tribunal asking to see ones papers are in order and demanding guilt. Bleck!

A rejection? A rejection of what? Of the efforts at feminist thought and the inclusion of feminist theory, do you mean? I’m not rejecting either? I don’t follow.

I specifically said that it wasn’t intentional, and wasn’t evidence of a conspiracy. Twice now. I honestly don’t think it was; I’ve even offered an account of how such things happen in terms given by the OP. I understand that I seem to have upset you, for which I’m sorry; I clearly should have breathed against the irritation before posting. All I sought to do was to point out that feminist thought has already established some very robust frameworks for analysing this stuff, with some exciting work being done right now. The reason for my umbrage was that the OP was suggesting directions for feminist thought without contemplating whether feminism might have got there first. I wasn’t setting myself up as tribunal, and that’s not how I approached this discussion (who is ascribing intention to who, exactly?). I know my knowledge is partial, as is everyone’s; I was suggesting, clearly far too clumsily, that perhaps working from being aware of that partiality might ensure that you’re not implying that this train of thought has never been explored. That, in turn, might have meant I was more likely to offer suggestions rather than feeling like I had to correct the impression that a whole bunch of feminist work simply hadn’t been done.

As for the points about kindness or warmth, I was simply suggesting that my second comment might have been slightly less reliant on goodwill if I’d gotten the edits on your comment before I posted. I was certainly not claiming I was entitled to anything – as I mentioned above, I have watched this blog for about 5 years now, and never commented (clearly I should have gone with that impulse).

Ahmed is not ‘traditional Marxist-althusserian’. That characterisation of her really fails to grasp precisely the genealogy (a feminist one) that I’m suggesting would be, and could be, very usefully entangled with the kinds of analyses you’re proposing here. And as for the stuff about minds and bodies, just a couple of points about the commitments of the feminist theories I’m gesturing towards: 1) they tend to explore mind and body (as defined by a long history of Western philosophy) as fundamentally entangled, and as such, offer a useful corrective, imo, to a tendency amongst cog sci thinkers to focus on cognition as if that were radically separable from affect and, well, a bunch of other things; 2) they tend to be informed by an understanding, sometimes derived from Merleau-Ponty, of being-in-the-world as a process through which being and world, and the always-incomplete distinction between the two (to the extent that being is nominalised), are formed (that is, that the (fantasy of) distinction arises from the sedimentation of particular styles of being both in the world and in thereby individualised bodies, rather than being neutral or pre-existing) which doesn’t look, to me, so very distinct from Barad, if working at a different level of elaboration; and 3) finally, in terms of the question of identifying ‘individual bodies’ via resemblances, or speaking univocally of queerness, race or sex (I take these as kind of related critiques), accounts like those of Alcoff, or of Zeiler and Wickstrom, or of Shildrick, or of Ahmed, really, are seeking to explore how bodies become through diverse and complex conceptual, perceptual, spatial, motile and experiential dynamics – in other words, queerness, or gender, or race are produced and reformed through producing bodies as ‘individual’ (a fantastical structure), and codify them within structures of resemblance. And of course, with this last point, this also means that the failures of these dynamics (what I would actually call ‘queer’, but that’s because I’m a queer theory person rather than an identity-politics person) are exposed, and enabled. I’m not going to pretend that all these accounts seek to explore the intentionality of non-human actors (depending on what your definition of ‘non-human actors’ or objects are, they probably to do certain extents, but not in others). But in terms of your original suggestion about Clark, which is where I see the real crossover, I really do think that this kind of work has offered substantial explorations of the ways that those things commonly defined as ‘attributes’ or ‘identities’ are produced in and through complex interactions between various bodies, spaces, knowledges, geographies, temporalities, objects, others and so on, and the ways that gender, race, and so on, are thus embedded in the world in ways that make them implicit and dense and active in both ways of becoming and in styles of cognition, as Clark suggests.

From a Marxist perspective, if I may be so bold, Clark’s thesis was long ago anticipated by Marx himself in the term ideology. Of course a central crux of Marxist ideology critique is that it understands the world and the ideologies that inhabit it from a non-ideological apprehension of the material world. But Marx’s theory of ideology as the religious, philosophical, and political “superstructure” for which society and economy provide the material “base” does not imply that ideology is somehow immaterial.

In a very real sense, ideology is embodied in superstructures, in skyscrapers, as worldly monuments to the false consciousness of society. In structures like Michelangelo’s Sistine Chapel, the Niemeyer-Corbusier UN Building, Mies van Der Rohe’s Seagram’s Building, etc. — these are not merely the “products” of ideology, but are rather ideology materialized. They continue to radiate and emit ideology down to the present day. They are each an architecture of the dead labor that was invested into the major theologico-politico-economic ideologies of bygone eras up to the modern age.

Just as the concrete materiality of commodities both veils and reveals the hidden social relationships that lie behind it, so also are the spaces and detritus of these built environments in the world a testament to the accumulated social orders that have passed through them, the minds of men, the dreams and nightmares of all humanity. For example, the center of Paris is an imprint of the twisted, reactionary imagination of Baron Haussmann. At times, ideology is a very physical, tangible thing, just as Clark says cognition is.

Also, I am not sure how groundbreaking or earth-shattering Clark’s idea is that the mind is more than the Cartesian pineal gland, and is rather deeply embedded into the material world, extended beyond the limits of the individual body, and can include objects outside of the “self.” Perhaps for someone working in the Husserlian phenomenological tradition, even in its more “embodied” form in Merleau-Ponty etc., Clark’s notion would be a shocking revelation. Perhaps that’s why WildlyParenthetical seems to be having so many quibbling difficulties with this Clark fellow.

But really, outside of those few who still cling to the idea that the mind is this immaterial prism through which we perceive “outside” phenomena — basically to anyone who has ever read Spinoza or Marx — Clark’s insight doesn’t really shed too much light, I don’t think. And with his notion of the world’s “scaffolding,” insofar as they prop up notions of gender, class, race, or whatever identity group you’d want to name, how is this scaffolding anything more than just a network of accumulated ideological excrescences? Ideology is not something up in the air, as I said in my last comment. It possesses shocking materiality, at times.

Really, though, I find Marx’s notion of “ideology” still richer than Clark’s conception of a distended mind swelling out into the world. The reason is that it encompasses more than just one person’s mind at a time, such that entire groups or segments of society (any collection of beings possessing mental capacity) can together produce material accretions of cognition, such that their thoughts collectively shape and reshape the world. And the embodied thoughts can even outlive the individuals who thought them. Ideological remnants and artifacts can be discovered almost anywhere you look.

So my question is then, is Clark’s idea really a theoretical innovation, or perhaps just an extension, or merely vindication, of materialist theories of mind that have come before?

I don’t think that’s the same thing, Ross. The idea, it seems to me, about Clark, is that paper and pencil are not expressions or embodiments of mind as much as they are components of a larger object, offering their own particular reality to this object called “mind.” I might be misreading Levi’s descriptions here of Clark (I haven’t yet read Clark himself), but it seems like you are saying that the pencil and paper really add nothing positive to mind, but are intermediates which materialize a pre-existent reality (mind or ideology). Again, this doesn’t seem to get to the more radical point that mind doesn’t pre-exist or cause these objects to do what they do, but that the human body and brain, interacting with these other objects, that itself causes an emergent reality different from either of them taken alone. Your perspective seems more to be saying that physical objects are a (physical or material) vehicle for ideology, rather than autonomous actors which add something of their own reality to the situation. I think it’s a very subtle, but very important, distinction.

Of course, you and Levi can correct me if I’ve misread either of you, here.

I may have expressed myself poorly above. It seems to me that you can still say that ideology doesn’t pre-exist these structures, and that ideology comes about exclusively through them, and still not come to the point Clark is making, which is that these inanimate entities are not just “there,” being passively formed by the greater force of the human will, but that they offer just as much positive ontological weight, resistance and power as the humans themselves. In this sense, minds are not expressed, but co-constructed by animate and inanimate forces alike, it seems.

The closest point of overlap I see between Marx and Clark is in Marx’s discussions of how technology transforms our modes of being in chapters like the one on the working day in Capital. Here I think Joseph’s comments are right on mark. Ideology isn’t really the place to look because it’s all about how ideas get projected on to matter, and that’s directly opposite what Clark is talking about. As for what he contributes, he works out a nuts and bolts of these relationships and phenomena in a way that I believe is sorely lacking in a lot of materialist theory (including Marx). The point isn’t “Marx or Clark”, but rather in how these things can mutually enrich one another. I’ve been arguing for an actor-network version of Marx for quite some time now. As for your remark about phenomenology, certainly Merleau-Ponty’s work doesn’t think in terms of an isolated cogito. Here Wildly is absolutely right to emphasize the work of feminists influenced by folks like MP as variants of a thesis similar to Clark’s. Check out his work, it’s very good.

Yes, Levi, I am aware that Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology was not a Cartesian cogito a la Husserl. The extended sensory organs (the eye, etc.) were very important to him. That’s why I said his phenomenology was a more “embodied” one; still, I think I could have made myself clearer.

And I can see what you mean with reference to the chapters in Marx where he talks about the workers’ interactions with the machines, but it’s almost in an opposite way, where the mind is subordinated to the operation of the machine, rather than the pencil/utensil which is commanded and manipulated by the mind.

From Marx’s description of the Cyclopean system of modern machinery, to the place of the worker within its system of organs:

An organized system of machines to which motion is communicated by the transmitting mechanism from an automatic centre is the most developed form of production by machinery. Here we have, in place of the isolated machine, a mechanical monster whose body fills whole factories, and whose demonic power, at first hidden by the slow and measured motions of its gigantic members, finally bursts forth in the fast and feverish whirl of its countless working organs…

All work at a machine requires the worker to be taught from childhood upwards, in order that he may learn to adapt his own movements to the uniform and unceasing motion of an auto­maton. Since the machinery, taken as a whole, forms a system of machines of various kinds, working simultaneously and in combination, cooperation based upon it requires the distribution of various groups of workers among the different kinds of machine. But machine production abolishes the necessity of fixing this dis­tribution in the manner of manufacture, i.e. by constantly appropriating the same worker to the same function.

In handicrafts and manufacture, the worker makes use of a tool; in the factory, the machine makes use of him. There the movements of the instrument of labour proceed from him, here it is the movements of the machine that he must follow. In manufac­ture the workers are the parts of a living mechanism. In the factory we have a lifeless mechanism which is independent of the workers, who are incorporated into it as its living appendages.

And to Joseph, I know that humanity must handle many pre-existing things, materials, objects, etc. in order to live day-to-day. Obviously I was talking of structures on a much grander scale than the simple example of the pencil and paper. In the construction of larger structures of the kind I’m talking about there is that smaller level of simple manipulation, i.e. pushing buttons, handling levers, shifting gears, etc.

Ross, my “quibbling difficulties” (dismissiveness is always fun) are not with Clark; I think you need to reread my comments. I don’t like that he maintains the privilege of the mind (*it* is what extends, rather than anything else) but it’s *anything* but shocking. And yes, that comes from being influenced by MP, but it’s certainly *not* because MP keeps an embodied subject ‘locked up inside its body,’ as you seem to imply, because he doesn’t. He very specifically says that the embodied subject isn’t ‘in’ the world, but ‘of’ it. Amongst, like, his entire corpus which is basically one big challenge to mind/body and self/world and self/other distinctions. Gah.

An important correction here: Clark is not claiming that mind is what extends everything else, as you suggest. Clark is claiming that these assemblages are mind. Quite literally the extended field is mind. Like MP, mind is already out there, among the extended things in the world. When Feynman says that his notes are his work, he’s literally claiming that the work did not take place in his head, that the paper, pencil, and process were indispensible and could not have taken place in his head. In other words, he’s arguing against the very thing you’re arguing against and is critiquing the very thing in cognitive psychology that you’re critiquing.

But this is just it, for Clark the pencil/paper are Not under the control of the mind in Clark’s example. First, for Clark mind is not one element in the assemblage, but rather mind is the assemblage of brain+body+pencil+paper. It’s not one of the elements, but is that totality, such that things out there in the world are a part of mind. Here’s an alternative example. My iPhone is literally a part of my memory. It’s not that I remember my iPhone, but rather it’s that my iPhone remembers for me. My memory is out there in the world in this object in such that no data storage is required for me. The nature of memory changes as a result of this device. For example, prior to writing, memory had to take the form of poetic rhythms because these are more easily stored in the head. Abstractions and deductions were difficult because they couldn’t easily be coded. With something like the iPhone this rhythmic poetic coding is no longer necessary because the device itself is the memory. New forms of thought are possible. The creature with an iPhone is literally a different species from the creature that relied on stored brain memory alone.

More significantly, there is no centralized controller here. It is not, as you suggest, that “mind” controls the pencil and paper as mere props for its own activities. Rather there are immanent features of the pencil and paper that play a big role in directing the activity. Here Marx’s factory example is closer to what Clark is getting at. In your example of the mind being subordinated to the machine, you’re ignoring the extended mind hypothesis by treating mind as one element in the assemblage. But for Clark, mind is not an element. It is that assemblage of machine, body, and brain. It’s not located in one of these elements, but is the totality. It’s that totality that thinks, not the brain that thinks. This, I believe, significantly transforms the nature of the questions we’re asking. If it’s that assemblage itself that’s the mind, there can be no question of emancipating the worker from the machine because the worker is that whole assemblage. Rather, the question is one of what sorts of assemblages we want or should strive to invent.

Yeah, no, I get it. The way I put it was poorly phrased, but the point remains: why are these things understood as ‘mind,’ and as part of cognition, when mind and cognition have, for e.g., been massively privileged over emotion and/or affect (depending on your affect framework), or over and against the passions? So my point is not so much that I *disagree* with Clark, but that because he fails to interrogate the mind/body split before he heads off into talking about ‘extension’, he maintains a problematic and massively gendered split between mind and body *even as* he’s ‘extending’ the mind. The ‘extension’ thing, I think, is kinda the problem: Descartes framed the body as extension, and that was part of how he centralised and privileged the mind. I’m suggesting that Clark, in maintaining the name and concept ‘mind’ (which I get: he’s talking to cog sci and psych people, as you say) and talking about extension, retains this, grounding his account on a premise which is demonstrably problematic, not least for feminist, queer, disability and critical race and whiteness concerns. Which is part of why I was originally trying to suggest it’s important to acknowledge the feminist work that really is already happening in this context: it’s kinda like Clark, in that it is partly exploring the constitution of cognition without presuming it happens ‘between the ears’, but is premised on a far more robust critique of the gendered mind/body split, and so actually addresses that Cartesian heritage in ways I’m not convinced Clark does.

I bite at the bit with respect to the use of the term “mind” as well. I am compelled to point out here, however, that I think you’re fighting a boogey of your own making. Mind is a generic term that embraces senses, affect, emotion, etc. Indeed, there’s been a massive pushback among a certain segment of the cog-sci community against cognitivist conceptions of mind that ignore affect among other things. Clark is an example of this trend, but also folks like Damasio. In Being-There a central target of Clark’s critique is cognitivist conceptions of mind that treat mind as “symbolic processing machines” “logic machines” or “representation processing machines”. This is very much in line with what I take you to be objecting to. It’s also something that I mentioned in either this post or the prior post on Clark where I discussed naturalism. The whole point for Clark is that the subject is massively embodied (the subtitle of the book is, after all, “Putting Brain, Body, and Environment Back Together”). With those caveats in mind, I will note that despite the elaborate detail with which he discusses the body– and he is incredibly nuanced and detailed there –there is no discussion of gender whatsoever. It’s legitimate, I think, to point that out.

All right, I think I am understanding better what Clark is trying to get at. But with the worker at the machine, whose mind would be the assemblage of brain + body + the Cyclopean machine into which he’s been integrated (through a lever or wheel or other mechanism), the mind which is an assemblage of those parts becomes increasingly automatic, deskilled, and impoverished. The machine literally renders the worker an automaton, reducing him to one of its organs.

Clark’s concept of an extended mind works better, or let’s say more “cleanly,” when the mind is operating with a more manageable, manipulable utensil. You know, something over which the mind has more “dominion,” rather than the monstrous machine. As opposed to factory worker, the artisanal craftsman or manufacture wields smaller, more pliable instruments/utensils. They are more easily subsumed into the mind’s assemblage of brain-body-tool.

Still, with this limited sphere of manipulation, I’m not clear where the larger concept of worldly “scaffolding” comes in. That’s the point where I think it bleeds more into ideology, or becomes indistinguishable from it. And that’s the point at which I think Marx’s concept of ideology is richer and more useful than Clark’s notion of “scaffolding” (I swear that Wittgenstein used this term before in his Philosophical Investigations).

So I guess it’s really not such an objectionable concept. With Wildly, I suppose I question the preeminence of the “mind” in the assemblage. Any one of the other elements could easily stand in for it and have “mind” as part of its assemblage. Plus, I tend to find questions of the mind and the sphere of “mentality” somewhat unnecessary; I much prefer the Hegelian/Marxian notion of “consciousness.” But I suppose that’s just my taste.

Okay, a couple of things. First, my point about Clark’s privileging of mind is not what I came into this thread to talk about – that was a response to Ross’s mischaracterisation of me ‘quibbling’ about the implication that feminist theory has not already grappled with the production of gender as a key dynamic in cognition through the gendering of space and objects and geographies and such. I’ve been mischaracterised a lot in this thread, and so I was correcting a misapprehension without wanting to give it too much airtime.

Second, whether or not Clark intends it, the phrase ‘extended mind’ does imply a centrality/internality from which the mind moves, *even if* that movement isn’t in Clark’s theory itself (as in, I don’t think he *is* saying that we start from the mind and then add ‘external’ bits in) but is to name the challenge of his theory to previous, ‘unextended’ versions of mind. I’m happy to agree that his theory is working to trouble that, but my point is that, with that phrasing, he’s remaining caught within a very particular history which brings with it some fairly problematic ideas, and which I think can, not necessarily in his work but as it is taken up, unnecessarily replicate some problematic politics. Feminists have chosen to centre embodiment in these kinds of discussions for really good reasons, in that they’re reacting against accepting that history; as such, there’s a politics to retain the term ‘mind’ here.

Third, as far as the idea of ‘putting brain, body and environment back together,’ I would say that without an account of the specificity of those brains, bodies and environments in terms of gender, race, class, ability, sexuality and so on, there’s still a universalisation of the specific (I suspect white, male, able-bodied, straight etc, but that’s just a cynical/realistic guess as I haven’t read enough). As a result, any deviation from this specific ‘universal’ gets situated as an additive to that universal, rather than its utter reworking.

And that is what I personally think is partly manifested in the continuation of the use of the term ‘mind’ (which has often been characterised as the blank universal slate to which are added the ‘contaminants’ of bodily attributes, getting in the way of the free use of mind). That is to say, feminists have very good and well-established reasons for asking why we might continue to use and privilege such gendered terms, *even if* we’re reworking what they signify; many use terms like ’emworlded’ and ’embodied’ and bodily-being-in-the-world to displace them. This isn’t to say it’s all bad, or so problematic as to mean one junks Clark’s whole thesis. It’s just to say that feminist thought has been intimately aware of the specificity of embodied subjects, so that the primary take-up of MP in the kind of thought I’m talking about is *through* que(e)rying universalisation. And it’s worth noting that this challenge has also been part of the way that the kind of feminist work I’m talking about has been marginalised – I wound up not doing work in philosophy because I wanted to talk about feminist and other critical work on embodiment and specificity, and no one was interested (despite John Sutton being in that department – now he’s one of the 4EA stars). This is why I’m not willing to simply say it doesn’t matter what Clark calls it – it does, even if the ways that it matters might have less to do with whether or not his work is interesting, and more to do with the genealogies he’s acknowledging in his work. Incidentally, I’m attending a conference next month designed to have feminist philosophies of the body encounter cog sci; it’s organised by a feminist.

I feel like I keep being situated as having massive problems with Clark. I don’t. As I’ve said so quite a bit! My problems with him are not very big; they might even be ‘quibbles’. It was Ross’s characterisation of my original point as a ‘quibble’ which I reacted to. My issue isn’t with the idea that Clark might be interesting. It *is* with the idea that his work would help feminist, queer etc thought expand its analyses of gender etc into new areas when I think feminist and queer and etc approaches have already done a lot of this work (who gets treated as an origin, a centre, and who gets situated as dependent, as derivative or reliant does actually matter!), and it’s by a fascinating set of thinkers often already marginalised by mainstream philosophy. So, good to acknowledge.

I think that the points you outline in your first paragraph are precisely why the extended mind hypothesis opens on to such a rich domain of social and political questions. All that you describe as taking place in the factory is absolutely true. All of this becomes invisible to humanist, Cartesian, and, I would wager, many phenomenological accounts of “mind”, precisely because mind is treated as an abiding and identical thing independent of the assemblages in which it exists. This is why assemblages, not human bodies in isolation, need to be the units of analysis.

Once the reading group gets started, the concept of scaffolding will be developed in more detail. Scaffolding refers to external entities in the environment that are at work in mind. It can’t simply be reduced to ideology, though ideology is one form scaffolding takes. It’s difficult to explain the concept of scaffolding without going into a lot of detail. Scaffolding ranges from everything to how we use the world about us to walk to our use of the iPhone to more complex things like ideology. The key point is that our brain capabilities are always limited. Detailed mental maps of the world are costly and impractical, so rather than having a complex mental map of the world that then guides our actions in the world, information is lodged in the environment itself. Take the example of two people dancing. A traditional Cartesian-cognitivist account would have it that the two people dancing each have a detailed mental model of the entire dance in their mind that is then executed, the extended mind hypothesis would argue that there’s little in the way of an overarching mental map of the dance. Rather, the dance that takes place is largely a sequence of interactions between the two dancers where the movements of the one person elicit the movements of the other person and vice versa, such that there’s no model of the dance as a whole but rather the dance is the result of this constant interaction. Here the information that leads to the actions is literally embodied in the other dancer and vice versa. It’s something that emerges with each step.

Walking is the same way. The argument would be that there isn’t a complex mental map of walking that we already possess, but rather that muscle response, tendon response, movement, etc., relies on the scaffolding of the environment both in learning how to walk and in walking. Compare here the difference between walking on a boat, walking on stony or icy terrain, and walking on a flat plain. In each case, certain features of the environment are singled out to assist in the process of walking, solving the problem of walking. For example, on the boat you might use a railing. The point is that there are features of the environment that “channel” us in a variety of ways. We don’t explicitly code them in our minds, but rather the features are out there. Think about the way in which a particular tool, for example, channels you to hold it in particular ways, to move in particular ways, and so on. Your brain isn’t making the decision here– though it plays a role –but rather the environment (here in the form of the tool) is making those decisions for you.

Clark would argue that we are never independent of scaffoldings, though there are a variety of different scaffoldings. Clearly the rocking of ocean waves is a scaffolding of a sort that sets a problem to be solved for people on a boat, but this is not ideology. This is why equating ideology with scaffolding says too much. Ideology is one form that scaffolding can take, but only one. That said, each of us does inherit tools, language, culture, etc., from those that have come before us. I don’t, for example, have to solve the problem of gathering food because I am born into a culture that has farming, distribution, highways, grocery stores, and restaurants. I encounter this as a framework within which my action is structured. As a result of this scaffolding it turns out to be pretty difficult to get my food simply by gathering, hunting, and fishing. The scaffolding itself generates a sort of scarcity that makes it difficult to live in the ways others once lived. Ideology, as the ideas of the ruling class is another type of scaffolding. We encounter a world that already has preformed ideas of how society ought to be structured that we swim in like a fish swims in water and that plays an important role in how institutions come to be structured and how people relate to one another. But it is one scaffolding among others, not the only scaffolding. The fact that, located where I am, I would probably die if I tried to live solely through hunting, fishing, and gathering is not so much an ideological observation– though certainly our food production and distribution systems is entangled with ideology –but is a product of how all sorts of things have come to be structured in the environment creating a scarcity of wild game and plants. This particular scaffold would include things like highways that disrupt migration and mating patterns, suburbs that transform the land, farms themselves, etc., etc., etc ., all of which channel human ways of acquiring food in particular ways (and I’m only using food as in illustrative example here).

This is why I’ve argued for quite some time that critiques of ideology and systems of representation are of limited value in producing political change. Insofar as ideology is only one small component of our environmental scaffolding, too much focus on ideology leaves us blind to all these channeling forces that structure human actions and possibilities in a variety of ways. Take the example of a business that’s failing near me. Is this business failing because of ideology? I don’t think so. Rather, this business is on a road that’s been shut down because new stores in its area are being built about it. Where before all sorts of car traffic was channeled down this road by the business, that traffic has disappeared and only a trickle of people pass buy. As a consequence, the business doesn’t get customers. The presence or absence of the road is non-ideological, though it is perhaps entangled in ideology. The point is that the road was a scaffold that channeled traffic towards the store. This is one of the key points of actor-network-theory, which is deeply in line with the extended mind hypothesis. There are all sorts of scaffolds of this sort that channel human actions and ways of being in the world that aren’t of the ideological, representational, semiotic, or linguistic sort. If we want to understand why social relations and identities take the form they take (and thereby open the possibility of changing them) we need to be aware of these scaffolds.

If I am understanding you correctly Clark is not attentive to the constructed space in which he writes regarding ‘mind’? His starting point is a kind of tabula rasa and that is what you ‘quibble’ with as the space of writing is already invested with presuppositions regarding gender and mind?

In other words, if we take seriously that the technics of writing forms an assemblage with the ‘biological mind’, then we would in some sense account for how it has been recorded and institutionalized in philopshy and the latters problematic relationship with science?

[E]ach of us does inherit tools, language, culture, etc., from those that have come before us. I don’t, for example, have to solve the problem of gathering food because I am born into a culture that has farming, distribution, highways, grocery stores, and restaurants. I encounter this as a framework within which my action is structured. As a result of this scaffolding it turns out to be pretty difficult to get my food simply by gathering, hunting, and fishing.

I hope you’ll forgive my attempt to make sense of everything in terms of Marx, but perhaps the more encompassing Marxian term that could stand in for Clarkian-Wittgensteinian “scaffolding” is “dead labor.” You remember the part in The Eighteenth Brumaire where Marx writes that

Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living.

Marx often referred to the whole network of ideologies, built environments, and indeed the whole social world as being propped up by the accumulated mass of dead labor that had come before it, which serves as its past and in large part its present. I’m not trying to diminish the niceness of Clark/Wittgenstein’s concept of “scaffolding” (I’m assuming that Clark lifted the notion from the Tractatus).

Wildly,

You may go ahead and quibble about my “mischaracterization” of your remarks as “quibbling.” I seriously doubt that there was an underlying political motive for the “privileging” of the mind over the body in Clark’s analysis. I tend to find the whole debate over mind/body tiresome, and as having already been resolved ages ago. And as far as the “gendering” or “queering” of embodied spaces goes, I understand you are trying to push for your feminist phenomenologists. But Levi already knows my feelings about identity politics and how it fits into the present crisis of the Left. I’m not sure, he’d probably see things more along your lines when it comes to this point.

As I said, I have problems with the use of the term “mind” as well. I think it generates all sorts of problems and confusions that tend to pull at what the theory is trying to get away from. That said, the core of Clark’s position is that of situated, embodied cognition. That’s very much on the same page as what you’re arguing for.

I think your second worry is more significant:

Third, as far as the idea of ‘putting brain, body and environment back together,’ I would say that without an account of the specificity of those brains, bodies and environments in terms of gender, race, class, ability, sexuality and so on, there’s still a universalisation of the specific (I suspect white, male, able-bodied, straight etc, but that’s just a cynical/realistic guess as I haven’t read enough). As a result, any deviation from this specific ‘universal’ gets situated as an additive to that universal, rather than its utter reworking.

And that is what I personally think is partly manifested in the continuation of the use of the term ‘mind’ (which has often been characterised as the blank universal slate to which are added the ‘contaminants’ of bodily attributes, getting in the way of the free use of mind). That is to say, feminists have very good and well-established reasons for asking why we might continue to use and privilege such gendered terms, *even if* we’re reworking what they signify; many use terms like ‘emworlded’ and ‘embodied’ and bodily-being-in-the-world to displace them. This isn’t to say it’s all bad, or so problematic as to mean one junks Clark’s whole thesis. It’s just to say that feminist thought has been intimately aware of the specificity of embodied subjects, so that the primary take-up of MP in the kind of thought I’m talking about is *through* que(e)rying universalisation. And it’s worth noting that this challenge has also been part of the way that the kind of feminist work I’m talking about has been marginalised – I wound up not doing work in philosophy because I wanted to talk about feminist and other critical work on embodiment and specificity, and no one was interested (despite John Sutton being in that department – now he’s one of the 4EA stars).

In Clark we get a lot of discussions about how walking takes place, how puzzles (literal puzzles) are solved, etc., etc., etc., but we don’t get any discussion of race, class, gender, etc., etc., etc.. Why is that? I don’t know. I’m of mixed thoughts here. On the one hand, Clark’s work seems to be strongly focused on very basic things that allows him to target the “mind in a box” Cartesian lineage. He’s focused on extremely simple things like how we walk, grab things, solve picture puzzles, etc. to illustrate the manner in which embodiment-environmental couplings function and why the “mind-in-a-box” thesis and “mind-as-centralized-controller-of-body” thesis is so mistaken. Are these universalizations? Of a sort, I suppose.

I guess my feeling is the thesis of Clark and others is strongly allied with the sort of work you’re talking about without doing that work. That was part of the point of this post. Clark’s position leads naturally to the thesis that we can’t universalize in the way you’re critiquing precisely because minds are necessarily (and here again I emphasize I don’t like the term “mind”) embodied, situated, and extended, and therefore that there will be differences that emerge as a function of differences in bodies (male, female, queer, straight, black, white, class-based, etc.), and as a function of the media/technospheres we inhabit. This thoroughly blows the universality thesis out of the water. If this is true, then the sort of illicit universalization you’re rightly critiquing is unsustainable. The point, then, is that work needs to be done developing the implications of this thesis in the heterogeneous domains you mention. There are a number of feminists and queer theorists that have done the sort of work you’re talking about. What I value in someone like Clark is that I feel he gives a rigorous grounding for this sort of work. And, for me, of course, I like it that he doesn’t do everything but opens a tremendous field of inquiry that leaves work for people such as you and me. I don’t take his absence of discussion of things such as gender to be a conspiracy on his part, but a product of finitude where one can’t do everything. Because I see no contradiction between the sort of work you’re talking about and the sort of work he’s doing, I take his work at face value and draw from it what I can in my own projects.

As a final point, I would also say that the sort of problems you outline are not unique to cognitive science, but have been endemic to feminist philosophy, queer theory, race theory, etc. These problems emerged under the title of “intersectionality”. As these forms of theory began to develop people would point out things like “wait, I’m not just queer, I’m also black person that belongs to the working class! I can’t be summed up under one of these labels and, moreover, the sorts of issues I face as a gay woman are different than those faced by a white gay woman, and the sort of issues I face as a woman are different for those of an ruling-class white woman!” In other words, in the various “studies” fields we increasingly got a critique of a tendency to ignore the embodied, embedded, situatedness of the agents being discussed. There was a tendency to talk about blackness in general, queerness in general, woman in general, class in general, ignoring these intersectionalities. I take it that the sort of work that you’re advocating wishes to contest this sort of gesture through an emphasis on intersectionality.

Okay, one final final point. I sympathize with the problems you’re talking about in your philosophy department when it comes to finding a home to do the sort of work you’re doing; however, I’m not sure this is entirely related to the fact that you’re working on gender (though I’m sure that’s part of it). My experience with the academy is that any work that doesn’t fit established discourses and disciplinary boundaries has a hard time finding a home in the academy. There are ways in which my circumstances are similar. Recall that I teach at a two year school that doesn’t even have a philosophy major and where there is no tenure. This has been my circumstance for six or seven years now. Why is this the case despite the fact that I’m fairly well published, have lots of experience, good letters, lots of service, and an excellent teaching record? I don’t think it’s because I’m queer or bi anyway (for some that doesn’t count), though it’s true I’ve never made this a central focus of my research, though it’s an important part of it. I think it’s largely because I don’t fit into nice disciplinary boundaries. On the one hand, Continental philosophy is already deeply marginalized in the United States and it’s worse for me because even among the Continentalists figures like Deleuze are treated as belonging more to lit departments than philosophy departments (there isn’t a burning call to hire Deleuzians). On the other hand, I just don’t fit neat disciplinary categories. I do work with a host of sociologists (Luhmann, Latour, Pickering, Law), psychoanalysts (Lacan, Freud), all sorts of media and technology theory, biological theorists such as Susan Oyama, a host of developmental systems theorists, Gould, Dennett, etc as well as folks like Clark (this puts me at an even greater disadvantage with the Continentalists who tend to react rather strongly against these things), and to make matters worse am a part of a largely unknown philosophical trend (SR/OOO) that calls into question some deeply established truisms or axioms of Continental thought. I’m pretty much screwed from the getgo. Those in other fields say “he’s not an x (media theorist, rhetorician, literary theorist, etc), but a philosopher!”, those in philosophy say “he’s not a philosopher, but a sociologist, media theorist, psychotheorist, etc!” and those in Continental philosophy say “he’s not a Continentalist but an analytic philosopher!” It’s extremely tough going to find any sort of home or place where you can work. I think this is the sort of problem that emerges when you are both doing innovative work and extremely multidisciplinary work.

Over the course of this discussion, I think we have gotten a lot clearer on what the two of us are talking about and have found that we’re much closer than we might have initially appeared. However, I have to say that if your initial responses are indicative of how you are interacting with others in your institutional milieu, then you might be inadvertently undermining yourself. Your initial posts left me ducking and waving in the air, wondering why I was being attacked when I agree. I felt as if I was being unfairly accused of very ugly things– sexism, trying to silence women, ignoring feminist voices –when 1) the post was on a particular theorist (Andy Clark) and therefore it comes as no surprise that it was focused on his claims, 2) I have written on a number of feminist voices in the past doing similar things, and 3) I was trying– perhaps poorly –to make a point similar to the one you seem to be making about the need to extend these forms of thought to broader domains. Your initial responses seemed to lack charity (you took me as trying to insult) or generosity, and also seem to suggest that one should only work on the themes that you work on (that Clark’s work couldn’t be valuable in its own right even if it doesn’t work on gender issues). Frankly this made me want to throw in the towel altogether and completely ignore the sort of work you’re talking about by virtue of that work seeming to situate me and others like me in a position of guilt. I take it that that’s not what you’re trying to achieve or do. A different rhetorical strategy, I think, would be far more effective in accomplishing the sorts of recognition you want to accomplish. I certainly know that I wouldn’t want to work with a person who accuses my work of being a conspiracy against other groups or as being complicit in trying to silence other voices. By contrast, something like “x has done a lot of this kind of work in the domain of gender theory” opens up the discussion and puts these issues on the table in such a way that links can be forged and collaborative work can begin.

Yes Ross, re: dead labor; though of course dead labor is only one type of scaffolding, but certainly an extremely important one. I’m not sure whether Clark gets his idea of scaffolding from Wittgenstein or not. I haven’t come across any references to Wittgenstein so far, though then again I wasn’t on the lookout for them either.

The logical scaffolding surrounding a picture determines logical space. The force of a proposition reaches through the whole of logical space. (pg. 22)

A proposition constructs a world with the help of a logical scaffolding, so that one can actually see from the proposition how everything stands logically if it is true. One can draw inferences from a false proposition. (pg. 25)

The propositions of logic describe the scaffolding of the world, or rather they represent it. They have no ‘subject-matter’. They presuppose that names have meaning and elementary propositions sense; and that is their connexion with the world. (pg. 76)

I’m not pointing this out as some sort of Wittgenstein fanboy looking to defend the honor of the “true lineage” of the concept. It’s just a concept I recognized from reading L.W. years ago. I’ve never been too keen on the man, actually.

Oh sure, Ross, I had no doubt that W. Has a concept of scaffolding, I’m just wondering whether Clark lifted it from him, that’s all. It seems to me also that the concept of logical scaffolding is different from that of scaffolding as Clark uses the term. The idea that my stove, spatula, pan, etc are a scaffolding that channels cooking in a particular way is very different than the idea of a logical order that scaffolds thought. The former are material dimensions and stabilities of a particular envirnment, not a series of syntactic rules governing relations between propositions.

Also, and I don’t mean this as an insult, but don’t phrases like “que(e)rying universalisation” come off as incredibly awkward and obnoxious? Such constant gerunding and pseudo-clever parenthetical additives has infected philosophical/theoretical language almost irreparably. I swear to God Heidegger ruins every language he touches — German, French, English. Ugh.

Again, not looking to take aim at you specifically WildlyParenthetical; you’re hardly the only offender.

Just a general comment: there seems to be a supposition on this thread that the only way that anyone can marginalise is by being conscious of it, and intending to do it. This is implied by terms like ‘conspiracy’ or ‘political position’. I sincerely don’t hold that perspective, and I’m surprised that people who seem to want to take seriously claims about injustice or social asymmetries or whatever would argue that, especially in a context which is acknowledging that more is always going on than we can be conscious of. In fact, it’s unpacking those ‘preconscious’, sedimented or ‘extended’ elements that I take to be a key part of addressing systemic injustice. I also think identity politics is massively problematic; I don’t think that that’s what I’m doing here, or anywhere else.

Whilst I agree that the development of the critique of intersectionality has been exciting and important for feminist, queer and other analyses, I also think it’s telling that it has been taken up so quickly and so thoroughly in the context of feminism and queer theory (queer theory, I have to add, is definitively *not* identity politics in my experience, but rather a critique of identity, so I don’t think it’s just another in a list of ‘identity’ studies) while areas like cog sci are still engaging in, as you say, ‘illicit universalisation’. In fact, intersectionality *informs* queer theory (they arose at about the same time, and informed each other, though not always happily, as critiques of identity) and many of the theorists of embodiment I was talking about. But the difference here is that I think that actually engaging with various forms of difference is vital in producing a rigorous grounding in anything, which is why, again, I will turn to feminist theorisings of embodiment (quite rigorous, I think) before I turn to Clark for my grounding. I don’t think that a ‘grounding’ that universalises can adequately address difference without taking it as ‘additive’ (that’s the lesson from intersectionality that informs the theorists of the body I’m talking about). And this is part of what I’m asking to be noticed here: the original post asked for feminism to be fitted into Clark’s theory, rather than vice-versa. I know this might seem like nitpicking, but centring an illicit universalisation as grounding more specific accounts (especially when those more specific accounts already exist) replicates the universalisation, and thus the marginalisation of those specificities (they become ‘women’s extended minds’, as a clumsy example, instead of rigorously reworking the concept of mind so that its gendering is clear). This is part of the politics of citation and canonisation, and it’s important to be aware of them, even as we acknowledge the limitations on all we do. That acknowledgement is important, as well, because that awareness of our own partial knowledges is key to maintaining an openness to possible alliance. Hence: still ambivalent about SR. ;-P

And Levi, as far as your advice goes, the way I engaged with this post isn’t how I engage if I don’t know a context; this one I did know. To be honest, I’ve quite regularly (over the past 5 or so years) had thoughts about how feminist work might intersect with yours, but I’ve also seen a kind of aggressive defensiveness and the misrepresentation I mentioned above, arise in response to others who have offered critique. So yes, it took frustration to override my never-comment policy. I also think that given that I specifically said that I wasn’t expecting you to know, but only pointing out it was problematic to assume that it wasn’t already happening, it was and still is kind of unfair to suggest that I was making accusations about ‘conspiracies to exclude’ or something. I get the defensiveness, I do – I am Not Great at dealing with certain kinds of critique either, especially when I thought I was being open and inclusive – but there was a lot of attributing accusations and intentions to me, when I had said exactly what I meant – that, again, I didn’t think it was intentional, that it was impossible to be across everything etc. And as much as I might have phrased myself differently, you, too, might have asked ‘does anyone know whether this kind of critique has already been taken up in feminist or queer spaces, as it seems to be a fruitful line of enquiry.’ I get that you’re unhappy with how I engaged, but that’s not just a one-way thing.

Your ‘advice’ feels really condescending and massively individualising, I have to say, particularly given the wide recognition of philosophy as a boys’ club, and as failing to take seriously feminist critique generally (the only lesson the philosophers in that department took or taught from feminism was to avoid sexist metaphors in your work, which is a massive oversimplification of LeDoeuf’s argument, and a way of making feminism a box to be ticked, an addition to be made, rather than a thorough-going critique of the mainstays of philosophical thought. And a way of making Sartre ignorable, though I don’t really have so many issues with that ;-P). I get that interdisciplinary work will always struggle to find a home, i really do. But I see the preclusion of talk about bodies and feminism from the vast majority of philosophical spaces to be the continuation of a really historically identifiable marginalisation of feminist voices, and that, along with, say, the sexism that characterises women raising their voice as out of control whilst men who raise their voice as taking control (not that I ever raised my voice in that setting; it’s just an example), means that I don’t think my exclusion from those spaces is as simple as *my* lacking openness. (I could tell you stories, but why bother? There are thousands of them online. And cultural theory is way more welcoming, if less institutionally supported!!).

And @ Will Yes, exactly; though I’d suggest that the characterisation of ‘mind’ hasn’t just produced problems for philosophy and science, but a whole range of fields, in a variety of ways. (I should also note that I don’t personally think that science and philosophy need or ought to agree, because I don’t think that it’s about the adequation of theory to ‘reality’; different stories are useful). It’s pervasive, which is why I think the critique from feminism needs to be taken really seriously.

And Ross, the extra parenthetical ‘e’ in querying *does* something, though, for those who are familiar with queer theory: it draws attention to the specificity of the universal, in terms of its investment in ideas of essentialist identities, in terms of sexuality, and its naturalisation. So no, I don’t find them awkward or obnoxious. You can not like it all you like – I really don’t mind – but I find them useful.

I agree with the thesis that exclusion need not be conscious to take place. What I’m suggesting is that you’re rather sloppily jumping to the conclusion that that particular exclusion is occurring as a result of an attempt to silence female voices. You write:

Just a general comment: there seems to be a supposition on this thread that the only way that anyone can marginalise is by being conscious of it, and intending to do it. This is implied by terms like ‘conspiracy’ or ‘political position’. I sincerely don’t hold that perspective, and I’m surprised that people who seem to want to take seriously claims about injustice or social asymmetries or whatever would argue that, especially in a context which is acknowledging that more is always going on than we can be conscious of. In fact, it’s unpacking those ‘preconscious’, sedimented or ‘extended’ elements that I take to be a key part of addressing systemic injustice. I also think identity politics is massively problematic; I don’t think that that’s what I’m doing here, or anywhere else.

One of the central claims of my own work is that information takes time to proliferate throughout social systems. There have to be real material connections that allow that information to flow out in a wave pattern (I discuss this a bit here: https://larvalsubjects.wordpress.com/2011/04/28/some-theses-on-cognition-and-related-matters/). I take this as a central materialist thesis. The fact that an idea takes place somewhere in the world, that something is written in the world, doesn’t entail that suddenly the entire world registers that thought. Words aren’t simply about something, they are something. The fact that they are material realities means that they have to circulate and be exchanged to be registered. Now let’s return to your points about Ahmed in earlier posts. Presumably, in referring to Ahmed, you’re referring, in particular to the collection of essays entitled New Materialisms: Ontology, Agency, and Politics edited by Diane Coole and Samantha Frost (http://www.amazon.com/New-Materialisms-Ontology-Agency-Politics/dp/0822347725/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1304889124&sr=8-1). Now let’s note a couple of things about this collection. It was released on August 10th, 2010. You’re talking about a very new body of work. Likewise, you are addressing a person that does not teach at a major academic institution and therefore does not have a well-stocked research library, but rather someone who teaches at a low-level institution devoted primarily to teaching, not research. As a consequence, I have limited access to both journals and books. Additionally, you are addressing a person who teaches five courses a semester, who has 150 students, and who is already overcommitted where writing and speaking projects are concerned.

Now let’s go back to your thesis about exclusion. How exclusion takes place is an important issue in this context. You wish to attribute this exclusion to some sort of systematic bias, institutional or otherwise, against women and gender theory. My theory is rather different. While I don’t deny that such things indeed take place, I don’t think that’s what was taking place here. First, there’s the point that I’ve repeated endlessly that I do and have written about feminist thinkers dealing with similar frameworks to the one I discuss about Clark in this post. I’m sorry that I don’t mention that in the final paragraph of my post, but is it really reasonable to ask one to constantly reiterate such a point every time they discuss an issue? Second, I think there’s simply the sheer materiality of information proliferation processes. The more charitable (and, I believe, accurate) account of why reference wasn’t made to theorists such as Ahmed is because of a material network of communicative relations where that particular reader and articles just haven’t proliferated throughout the particular sphere of discourse yet. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I literally only learned of the New Materialisms reader two weeks ago. That’s a function of the time a message takes to travel in a network. If you’re going to engage in materialist analyses of networks, you should at least have an accurate map of the networks you’re talking about. You’re using sexism as an all-purpose explanation here, when there’s a host of other materialist features of these networks that contributes to how the theorists you’re talking about are circulating throughout the world.

When you write the following (and you’ve written something like this a few times now) I think you’ve entered ad hominem territory in your responses to me:

To be honest, I’ve quite regularly (over the past 5 or so years) had thoughts about how feminist work might intersect with yours, but I’ve also seen a kind of aggressive defensiveness and the misrepresentation I mentioned above, arise in response to others who have offered critique. So yes, it took frustration to override my never-comment policy. I also think that given that I specifically said that I wasn’t expecting you to know, but only pointing out it was problematic to assume that it wasn’t already happening, it was and still is kind of unfair to suggest that I was making accusations about ‘conspiracies to exclude’ or something.

Your thesis here seems to be that I’m aggressively defensive and not really making arguments at all (I’m just “uppity”). The debates where things have gotten really heated have tended to follow a particular pattern. Someone charges me with being, for example, a proponent of neoliberal capitalist politics despite the fact that I’m a Marxist. Someone else attempts to charge me with excluding queerness despite the fact that I both write a great deal about queerness and am, well, yanno, queer. Etc., etc., etc. In those contexts I think it’s justified for discussion to get a bit heated. Throughout this discussion, I believe I’ve been entirely above board. I haven’t personally attacked you or tried to insult you. What I’ve done is point out what I take to be a series of inconsistencies (what Freud called “kettle logic” ) at work in your claims. That’s not “aggressiveness”, but simply good’ole fashion critique that takes place in the course of a discussion. In this discussion you’ve charged me with some pretty extraordinary and egregious things. It really ought to come as no surprise that I carefully try to critique and contest those claims (especially when I largely agree with all the points you’re making about embodiment, institutional exclusion, situatedness, the foreclosure of the body, etc., etc., etc.).

But honestly, this is getting pretty repetitive here. We’ve both made these points again and again. I feel as if I keep saying “Wildly, I agree and find those things every bit as important as you do!”, only to have you say something like “you don’t agree enough or in the right way!” I’m really not sure what more I can offer. In response to your recommendations I’ve said that this sounds like great stuff and I need to check it out. In response to your critiques of institutional exclusion and the foreclosure I’ve said yeah, I think that’s true! I’ve agreed. From my end it feels as if you want me to wear a hairshirt or flagellate myself or something, despite the fact that I’m trying to contribute to a conceptual space that hopes to assist in overcoming those problems. We’re getting silly at this point. Rather than discussions of culpability and guilt, isn’t it far better to, well, just get on with talking about embodiment, situatedness, how institutional and social structures are put together, and how certain exclusionary and oppressive hierarchical structures are put together? I get the feeling– and correctly me if I’m wrong –that you’re position is that i should be talking about Ahmed rather than Clark. I’m fine with talking about Ahmed and Clark, but am not fine with excluding the one or the other or being required to talk about Ahmed when I’m making a point I draw from someone like Clark about what I think the implications of some particular theoretical point might have for Marxist theory, queer theory, or feminist theory.

Yeah, but it has about the same rhetorical effect as wanting to teach a feminist history course, titling it “herstory” rather than “history.” And yes, it is that banal. Sorry.

Anyway, I’m glad that you also find identity politics problematic. I’ve long been wanting to do an “Identity as Ideology” critique of the various identity groups floating around insofar as they become narrow political constituencies disconnected from a broader vision of social transformation. The various emancipatory movements that have sought legal/formal equality under bourgeois liberal democracy are great insofar as they’ve more nearly approximated equality with the “hegemonic” white male. But outside of this narrow, often single-issue commitment, they’ve become largely separatist and have effectively abandoned any vision of revolutionary social politics.

A critique of identity insofar as it might make assumptions that crudely “privilege” one particular viewpoint is useful. But the universal subject of history, the Lukacsean simultaneous subject-object, has to be sought in the most developed, advanced capitalist nations, as Marx suggested. Definitely not from the Wallersteinian “periphery” of capitalism, authoritarian backwater hellholes. And I swear to God, the soft left’s reification of “the Indigenous” and “the Native perspective” have to be categorically rejected and sent back up to the slaughterbench of history. I even doubt that “the Indigenous” exists, at times.

Certain identity groups I find much more intolerable than others. Especially the romanticized ones.

I’d like to trace a middle path between claims you’re making and claims that Wildly has been making. With Wildly I just don’t agree that all these struggles can be reduced to a single core or ground (such as global capitalism). As I argued in our prior exchange a while ago, I just don’t think the sorts of issues raised by women, people of color, GTLB folks, ecologists, etc., can be reduced to struggles pertaining to capital. There is intersectionality here, there is entanglement, but there is also distinctness. The issues of women, for example, are pressing in their own right, deserve to be sites of struggle in their own right. There are features of these struggles, moreover, that I just don’t think are reducible to how capital functions. Here, also, I would thoroughly endorse Wildly’s critique of a particular sort of universalism. There are ways in which the “universal” can function as a disguised particularlism that’s not universal at all, but which rather privileges the interests of a particular group. This often happened in early Marxist socialist movements. “Worker” became code for “male” and women and people of color were shunted aside. Not only were they shunted aside, but often the burgeoning feminist activist– perhaps even sympathetic to Marxist critique –was told that her particular struggles were actively contrary to Marxist political engagement. In other words, it was only the interests of the male workers that mattered.

With that said, I think there’s something a little misguided in Wildly’s criticisms of “generalist” embodiment theory. In my view, it’s important to get the general contours of situated, embodied, agency on the table in a rather abstract form without focusing overly on particular types of embodiment. Here I think we can begin to discern the particularism at work in Wildly’s critique of Clark. Clark is to be criticized, according to Wildly, for not discussing gender. Yet where, in Wildly, do we find discussions of race, disabilities, queer agency, or class? Why is gender the privileged term, yet all of these are excluded? My point is not that we shouldn’t discuss gender, but rather that we want a theory of embodiment that’s broad enough to be ported into these various contexts and fleshed out in these various contexts. I believe this is the sort of work that people like Merleau-Ponty, Clark, Sterelny, Protevi, Massumi, and Noe are doing. The advantage of their theoretical framework is its flexibility. It can be put to work in a variety of more specific cases, deepened, and fleshed out, but there is also something to be said for the very broad, abstract, and basic theory.

This point begins to converge, I think, on your side of the equation. There’s a vast difference between the critique of an implicit universal that is really a disguised particularlism, and the insistent call for universal egalitarianism as an insistent call within the social field and integral to what constitutes justice. A politics that merely replaces one particularlism with another particularism merely replaces one injustice with another injustice. I have a hard time seeing how the call for the universal can be eradicated from any truly leftist, emancipatory, and egalitarian politics. What we then need is a form of the universal that is somehow capable of responding to difference or particularism such that it’s able to juggle all these competing particulars. This, I think, is precisely the sort of thing that folks such as Badiou, Zizek, Laclau, Ranciere, Balibar, and others have been trying to work out. Here the universal is not a pre-existent ground that’s already there as in the case of disguised particularisms parading in the clothing of universals, but rather the universal is an insistent call within the social field that marks the space of an open-ended project where identity cannot be pre-delineated in advance. What’s interesting is that part of this conception of the universal involves the relinquishing of identity. Rather than fixed identities that are then represented (particularisms), the sort of Neo-Maoism of this conception of identity is one of border-crossing, where new forms of life are invented rather than people fixating on identity as a sort of cultural essence. This, I think, is a bit of what queer theory is getting at with the critique of identity alluded to by Wildly in an earlier post, but also meshes nicely with the sort of ethics Jane Bennett develops in The Enchantment of Modern Life. Rather than reterritorializing and territorializing identity, this politics instead involves an ethics of generosity, joy, and love that involves all sorts of mutability and becoming-other as a result of encounters. Situating and translating this in a Marxist context, it’s not simply that workers get “represented” and remain workers as they were, it’s rather that workers, in revolutionary praxis, become something other than they were, along with all other identities in the social system. Such would be true of all genuinely leftist forms of political engagement.

Despite bristling at Bennett’s use of the term “enchantment”, I also think she gets at something fundamental in her points about joy, love, and generosity. For a lot of leftists, these terms seem a bit cheesy and as if they aren’t hard enough. Bennett’s point, however, is that it is impossible to be ethically and politically committed to anything if we don’t love it and find joy in it. She wants affirmative affects at the ground of her politics. Here I think she’s essentially right. Sans some form of love, horror, joy, despair, etc., it’s difficult to engage in any political project. There are two important points lurking here. First, for Bennett, one of the unintended consequences of the project of disenchantment (and she’s trying to develop a form of secular enchantment) is that it has left us practically paralyzed. Because we have come to believe that some ugly set of motivations is lurking behind any and every form of engagement, we find that we’re unable to engage on behalf of anything at all. Part of this, Bennett contends, results from absenting political affect from the sphere of engagement. Second, and perhaps even more important, the sorts of politics we end up with is going to be deeply related to the sorts of affects that underlie our political engagement. Drawing on Nietzsche’s vocabulary, we can have a politics of ressentiment premised on envy, debt, guilt, punishment, etc., or politics of joy premised on enhancing capacities to act, connect, relate, etc. I don’t think the affects that underlie our ethical and political visions are tangential or unimportant. These affects will largely define the sorts of collectives we produce, with the former, I believe, leading to horror, suffering and injustice.

I bristle more at the suggestion of a Neo-Maoism than at the term “enchantment.” Any sort of Maoism is always tacitly Stalinism, with an agrarian twist. This is why I’m always a bit uncomfortable with Badiou. But yes, your point about universal egalitarianism is well-taken. That was a promise of political liberalism, along with freedom and internationalism (universal fraternity). But of course the equality that liberalism granted was only a formal, legalistic equality — and even then, only for men. Bourgeois democracy has gradually extended these formal rights to be more and more inclusive of different identity groups. But the material and substantive disparities between the different segments of society have remained throughout. This is the promise that liberalism has failed to live up to: true justice and social equality.

As a follower of Lukacs, Benjamin, and the Frankfurt School, I take the Weberian thesis of the disenchantment of the world quite seriously. No longer can the phantoms of religion or the magic of the ritualized act leave us spellbound. A secular reenchantment could be in order. In post-revolutionary Russia, technology held a sort of hypnotic sway over the minds of the modernists. They dreamed of the mechanization of mankind, a techno-utopia to wrap the world. Plans were drawn up for floating cities and laboratories of sleep. El Lissitzky called for the conquest of gravity. Since that time, with the many failures, retreats, and capitulations of the Left, no such revolutionary imagination has risen to look to fundamentally transform society.

And the segmentation and gradual separation of the various identity groups (feminism, race politics, gay/queer politics) from the socialist movement was largely the Left’s own fault. The Left deserves all the anarchist nonsense and particularist agendas that have gradually arisen in its place. But for a reconstitution of the Left, only an unrelenting critique of both existing society and of the history of the Left itself will suffice to rectify its sorry state. The only positive proposals it can promise in its emancipatory politics — and Levi knows I’m quite reluctant to offer prescriptions — must be of the most general nature: total sexual freedom; absolute equality of gender and race; a classless society, the total self-conscious mastery over (and disalienation from) nature; freedom from poverty and disease, indeed, even freedom from death itself. These must be the promises for all of society, irrespective of race, gender, sexual orientation, or creed.

Ironically, I’ve been reading Coole and Frost’s New Materialisms collection recently. I just wanted to offer this paragraph as an overview:

The idea of the encounter alludes to a chance conjuncture of atoms, the event, whose consequence may be the provisional configuring of facts or forms. History emerges here as the continuous transformation of provisional forms by new, indecipherable and unanticipated events, with the corollary lesson that an aleatory intervention may be more efficacious than the patient understanding of trajectories and working through of continuities whose internal logic of development is assumed to endure. In politics, this means that the state is always inscribed with the possibility of its imminent collapse or reconfiguration, where the utter indifference of the people to rule and their unresponsiveness to interpellation by the state apparatus yields the permanent possibility of a revolutionary event capable of halting the political machine. Such events occur in what Althusser calls the void: the space in which the encounter occurs that reconfigures the current conjecture’s elements. However, although the constitution of new phenomena (such as western capitalism) is now viewed as entirely contingent rather than as destiny of forces maturing in an earlier phase, such phenomena may still have necessary effects and persist for a greater or lesser period of time. While the choreography of the encounter suggests an affinity with chaos theory, Althusser’s own approach suggests that he was not equating aleatory materialism with a new set of theoretical, systemic abstractions but with an empirical, concrete analysis of the forms and forces at work. What we would like to emphasize here is that in a multimodal materialist analysis of relationships of power, it is important to recognize their diverse temporalities by examining their more enduring structures and operations as well as their vulnerability to ruptures and transformation–all the while acknowledging that they have no predestined necessary, or predictable trajectory. (New Materialisms, 35-36)

It feels repetitive, I know; that’s because I’m trying to indicate lines from our agreement to my original irritation here. It’s not that you’re agreeing in the wrong way or something, it’s that my original annoyance is being coded as simple lack of generosity by implying that ‘all I really wanted’ was to suggest other authors to you. It’s not.

I’m also weary of being mischaracterised: I agree with the thesis that exclusion need not be conscious to take place. What I’m suggesting is that you’re rather sloppily jumping to the conclusion that that particular exclusion is occurring as a result of an attempt to silence female voices. ‘Attempt to silence female voices’? How this that not about ascribing intention? There’s a really important reason that I have never *said* that you were ‘attempting to silence female voices’. Because I don’t believe it, and because I don’t believe it’s necessary to attempt to silence anyone in order to exclude them. That doesn’t mean that responsibility stops at the point where you haven’t actively silenced anyone, though. As I’ve been trying to underline, some sense of the partiality of our perspectives makes us more open and generous to others: it means that happening across that final paragraph of your post wouldn’t have made me annoyed – not that people don’t know about particular feminist authors, but because they’re assuming that they don’t exist/that feminist analyses require this particular insight. I would have been *excited* to encounter that kind of openness here.

And I hear what you’re saying about the filtering through networks. For the nth time, I don’t believe that this is simply about the exclusion of feminist voices. I think it’s about a whole range of things, but the continued marginalisation of women’s voices feeds through in which books you hear about, which authors other authors you read are citing, etc etc etc. It’s not about saying ‘this it the only thing at work here’- obviously it’s not, and I never suggested it was – it’s about saying that there are multiple things at work that *still* mean that even those who are interested aren’t hearing about this stuff, and that perhaps working from *that* assumption rather than from the assumption that you’d hear about it if it was important enough for your work, is a good move. This isn’t a brand new area of thought, actually; its history goes back to the mid-90s. Sara Ahmed, to just take her as an example, has been doing this kind of stuff for a while now. It’s not about a book published in August last year (I haven’t read that book, and it’s not in my institution’s library, and definitely won’t be unless I request it, like I’ve requested many books so far this year). Ahmed’s first of eight book was published in 1998, and the kind of work I’m alluding to above really comes through in her work in the books from about 2001. Elizabeth Grosz’s contribution to this field (I didn’t reference her because her current work has disavowed this history, despite its usefulness for other thinkers) was in 1994. Rosalyn Diprose’s ‘The Bodies of Women’ is also from 1994, though her 2002 book is probably more in line with the kinds of suggestions being made here. Vicki Kirby’s was published in 1997. These aren’t brand spanking new critiques published last year, they’re established areas of study which, obviously, many people have never heard of. I’m absolutely not suggesting that anyone ought to be across all of this – in fact, I’d caution anyone against presuming they have a complete grip on it based on what I’ve said here (I should note here that many of these authors identify as doing feminist theories of embodiment, and are interrogating structures of race, sexuality, disability, class, amongst other less categorisable differences; feminism hasn’t ‘just’ been about gender for a long time). The point is just that some awareness that your knowledge of fields like feminism is likely to be shaped by the asymmetrical valuing of feminist voices in ways that might make it worth being circumspect about it.

In terms of my critique of Clark, actually all I’ve insisted on was that his universalisation needs to be displaced; whilst I’ve used the term feminism here, I am alluding to theorists who work intersectionality through in their work (as they all call themselves feminists, and use feminists’ work, I’ve grouped them together as such here). So whilst I acknowledge that I’ve talked primarily about feminism here, that shouldn’t be taken to ‘only’ be about gender. (‘Queer Phenomenology’, for e.g., is about sexual orientation, but also about sex, race, immigration, class etc. Shildrick’s ‘Embdying the Monster’ interrogates ability, sex, queerness etc. They do identify as feminist, but that’s not as narrow as you’re implying).

I don’t think it’s ad homininem to observe a pattern in your engagement in this space, especially when what I’m underlining is its effect on my willingness to engage and what it took to make me risk it – and yes, it felt like a *massive* risk. I think I’ve been pretty above board here too, and your accusations of ‘kettle logic’ seem to apply to your ascription of particular arguments to me, not to arguments I actually made. There’s a reason that I’ve been forced to clarify this point so many times it’s now become this ridiculous thread.

And Ross, look, we’re going to disagree here. And that’s because when you say ‘irrespective of race, gender, sexual orientation or creed,’ while suggesting that attempting to draw attention to the specificity of history is banal, I can’t help that think that your imagination of ’emancipation’ will not have sufficiently come to grips with the specificity of its history and its commitments (not conscious, probably, the vast majority of them!), and thus risks replicating the same exclusions.

I’ll also confess that this whole thing is a bit of a sore spot for me because OOO/SR has been charged with being a white, hetero boys club and I’ve worked very hard to include other voices, bring these sorts of issues into the fold, and promote the work of others that don’t fit that predominantly white male matrix. Often I feel that this charge is a bit of a low blow as we really can’t help the fact that SR arose in and through four white dudes. That strikes me as thoroughly contingent, and nothing is preventing others such as yourself from stepping up and participating and contributing. Tim Morton and I have both been pretty tireless in trying to bring feminist and queer issues to the forefront in our work. With that said, I’m pretty obviously situated in a particular theoretical tradition that leans heavily on Haraway, Barad, Bennett, and Stengers. I’m sure there’s plenty I’m missing. That said, I just don’t think it’s fair to say “x is filled with a bunch of dudes” as a critique. What’s needed is some sort of analysis of how these forms of thought systematically presume gender privilege at the level of theoretical content. Here I have something like Derrida’s exemplary reading of Lacan in The Postcard where he shows an illicit privileging of the phallus throughout his earlier work. One of the criticisms of The Speculative Turn was that it only had one female voice (Stengers) and two people of color (DeLanda and Negerastani). We tried, we really did, but that’s how things shook out. No doubt I’m particularly sensitive to this line of criticism because of these sorts of things.

The Bolshevik revolution, in its first 13 years of existence as a new state, passed the following laws: 1. it legalized homosexuality (it was illegal in all of Europe and the U.S.); 2. gave women the right to vote before any other nation; 3. encouraged women to work the same jobs as men, thus freeing them from “domestic slavery”; 4. legalized abortion (illegal in Europe and the U.S.); 5. made divorce easy, and even allowed individuals to be married to multiple partners; 6. offered universal opportunity to work, regardless of race or nationality (remember, the USSR constituted 17 national republics, with large Turkish, Jewish, and Asiatic/Mongolian populations).

Although these laws were largely reversed following the Stalinist betrayal, the universalism that Marxist communism stood for, its utopian commitment to the absolute equality of all, these were the ideals that a unified, integrated Left offered along with its transformation of society.

I do understand that it’s a sensitive spot, and I sympathise. It’s just that to me those sensitive spots need to be, without suggesting anyone needs to be a saint, sites at which some care is taken with critiques that are made. In this sense, ‘Nothing is preventing…’ is probably a bit too strong here, even as, to be clear again, I’m not suggesting that there’s anything deliberate or malicious about why people might feel OOO isn’t quite a space that *is* open and welcoming to them. (Though like I said, it took frustration to overcome my no-comment policy, and as I think this thread demonstrates, I can be mule-like when required; others wouldn’t have the resources to negotiate with the kinds of accusations levelled at me, and their critiques are probably more important than mine).

As for the suggestion that feminists need to critique OOO, well… maybe. Or alternatively, perhaps OOO needs to explore feminism (and queer theory – there’s a worrying tendency to equate queerness and queer theory, I think – and critical race and whiteness studies, and crip theory, and… and… and… ;-P) more thoroughly to come to grips with why that accusation (with its nasty erasure of queerness – sorry that that’s happening) might be being made. It’s not ‘adequate’ as criticism, perhaps, but gesturing to contingency is not really the end of responsibility either(privilege not just being about what you wield, but about how you’re situated). As you clearly know, or you wouldn’t be working on that other book or making efforts to include other voices, or continuing this conversation! I’m saying all of this, btw, without really knowing whether I agree with that critique. I have concerns about some stuff, but I also don’t have the time to fully explore it – there’s a lot to come to grips with now, and I’m not sure whether avoiding defensiveness is an easy thing!

And my preferred Lacan critic remains Irigaray, even as Derrida is very dear to my heart. ;-P And yes, it’s probably partly her sarcasm! :-)

My research involves the connection between workplace analysis and extended or, better, distributed theories of cognition. As such, this blog has been quite exciting to read through – thanks to everyone for their passionate involvement! I’ve picked up some helpful references, cheers! I have to bring notice to the limits of Clark’s version of this thesis in order to shed futher light on some of the issues raised in this blog.
First off, Clark does not hold that the pencil and paper are ‘mindful’ or ‘cognitive’ in their own right (apart from their participation in an active, occurrent cognitive system). He often employs the helpful analogy of a single neurone. Is a neurone, isolated in a Petrie dish, cognitive? Quite obviously, no! The moral is that connection matters. A neurone (or pen and paper) needs to be linked up in appropriate ways in accomplishing cognitive tasks (eg remembering, deciding, deliberating, and so on). But it’s also important to note that any old set of things working together in accomplishing a cognitive task does not guarantee membership of all participants into the class of ‘cognitive’ supports. In many of Clark’s papers including the one with Chalmers, various conditions are espoused regarding what counts as a ‘cognitive object’. So, strictly speaking, the particular pen & paper I employ here-and-now to solve this task might not be best described as aspects of a larger cognitive system. As Richard Menary argues in his recent book, the ‘cognitive objects’ are the representations I can create and manipulate by writing on some medium (doesn’t matter if it’s paper, papyrus, a tablet, or a computer screen). So it seems that the socio-cultural practice of writing and manipulating inscriptions is what enables the ‘cognitive’ use of pen and paper, not the pen and paper themselves (the near linguistic bonobo Kanzi from Savage-Rumbaugh’s research is a nice example of the potency of ‘culture’ or social practices in ‘extending’ cognitive abilities).
Many of you are apt to notice the generality and the questionable tradition involved with the term ‘mind’. Though Clark dabbles in discussing ‘mind’ as an extended phenomenon, most of his work revolves around ‘cognition’. This term merely regards ‘information’, meaning that robots and computers have cognitive properties in lieu of being information-processors. Mindedness is a more difficult concept to argue for, especially in the cognitive sciences. Clark holds a rather interesting position when it comes to mindedness vs. cognition. He thinks it rather likely that consciousness is restricted to brain processes, unlike Noe who takes perceptual consciousness as extended. Clark also hints that his understanding of agency is bound to the brain or organism. Regarding the question of how extended cognitive systems are assembled, Clark points to the brain or some set of neurones as the driving force. This move has the positive dialectical consequence of belaying worries that the extended cognition thesis somehow loses sight of the ‘enduring locus’ of research in cognitive psychology and neuroscience (a worry raised by Rupert). However, as Hutchins points out in a critique of Clark’s ‘Supersizing’ book, this is to fall right back on an internalist explanatory methodology, thereby “forfeiting the distinctive vision” of the extended cognition thesis.
In fact, I believe that Clark’s position lines up perfectly with the metaphorical entailment of ‘extended’. Cognition (or mind, if you like) starts from somewhere within and extends outwards.
In my own work, I choose to start with Hutchins’ term ‘distributed’ cognition for it assumes no particular spatial or temporal location in addressing cognition. It seems this approach lines up better with actor-network theories, intersectionality, and, perhaps, feminist views than Clark’s ‘extended’ cognition. Distributed cognition inevitably ends up being a multidisciplinary project, given that sociality, history, development, materiality and so forth are always implicated in real-world, here-and-now cognition. Even the concept of agency gets ‘distributed’ in this framework, as one’s actions (and identity) cannot be divorced from contextual considerations. I’m aware that these conclusions have already been reached in various disciplines in varying degrees. I don’t take it that the conclusions are now ‘legitimate’ given their scientific standing, where before in the hands of philosophers, sociologists, and critical thinkers they weren’t. However, from a pluralist perspective, it is certainly nice to see the science moving alongside the non-science. In fact, I find it a virtue of science (or philosophy of science) that it hasn’t tried to make explicit contact with other non-scientific academic allies. Arriving at similar conclusions with vastly different methodologies provides legitimacy to these shared conclusions.
That said, I agree with many of the posts that there is an exciting space to be explored regarding policy and ethics in conjunction with a distributed conception of cognition. However, we should take heed of Wildly’s insistence on looking into work already done along these lines in the feminist tradition.

Thanks for your thoughts, wonka4! I am looking forward to this conference I’m headed to shortly, which is meant to stick feminist philosophies of the body together with cognitive scientific accounts, and it’s really great to get even these little slices of what might potentially play out there! :-)